Recently while trying to build a Solaris JumpStart server, I encountered an error in reading the home-burnt DVD-ROM disk of Solaris 10 10/08. There are many threads out on the internet that talk about the same difficulty and issue. To circumvent the issue, I needed to manually mount the DVD-ROM. To do this, you first need to disable the volmgmt software in Solaris. Since I am running Solaris 10, the command is simple:

Following a recent installation of Windows Server 2008 on top of Windows XP, I had difficulty in removing some of the old files that got left behind. Several directories in the root of drive c: were not accessible due to user permissions. The steps for removing the files were very straight forward.

Recently I needed to fetch Bind 9 statistics from a newly installed Bind 9.5.0-P2 server using wget. To fetch the statistics and have the output file named 'bind.xml', I performed the following command:

In a previous FAQ, I showed how to mount a DVD-RAM drive. Well, you must first prepare the disk for mounting, and put a filesystem on it. To do this, download the udftools from Sourceforge or use the YUM RPM installer on Fedora to install the latest version out there.

Once the software is installed, its a single command to prepare the drive and new media:

Once the new drive is prepared with the partition, it is now mountable. If you run fdisk on the device such as /dev/sr0, you should see that there is a single Extended partition. In my case, it created /dev/sr0p1. The mount command worked flawlessly after that sequence.

The first thing you have to do is identify which is the proper device that "maps" to the DVD-RAM drive. You can do this via the "dmesg" command or examining the boot information in the /var/adm/messages file. In my case my DVD-RAM drive was /dev/sr0. First I created a mount point:

mkdir -p /mnt/dvdram

next, I added the following line into the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sr0 /mnt/dvdram udf rw,nosuid,uhelper=hal,uid=500 0 0

Once that is done, you can mount the drive usign the mount command or rebooting the system. I tested the mount command first by: